Titanic Tea Dress with Lisa Posting for Robin

Robin has been without computer while I've been without sewing machine.  She sent me a couple of phone pics of her progress and I'm posting them for her.  I have pictures of her bodice but they are both poor quality, and show a bit of skin that she might prefer not to share.  So, with that, here is her basted together tea dress in it's poorly lit iPhone glory!
And here is MY hat!  pinned to the hat form, curled, warped and partly decapitated.  The crown was too tall for my cranium.
Now that I've posted this, she can pile on with her comments of woe about fitting this pattern.  Because she really, really doesn't like it.  She is a stickler for fit.  I am delighted by baggy loose stuff.  This is why I need her.  BTW, that's a $3 wall decoration not a 'real' hat.  Robin is working miracles.

I got to a point on this bodice where I just gave up. I cannot make it stop bunching in strange places.  Yes, I know it is kimono-style sleeves and that there should be some pit-ease but this thing bunches above the bust, at your clavicles, any- and every- where it pleases and no amount of futzing is going to fix it.  This is the Whack-A-Mole of bodices whereby, if you fix one thing, another pops up wrong. This is after two muslins, one if which fit fine until I cut it out of fashion fabric.
You can't see it in the photo, but the layers are all wrong, too.  The bodice is just basted to the bottom layers. This thing looks like a Mother-of-the-Bride dress, and a bad one at that.  I'm just hoping that a lovely, creative sash and a killer hat will keep people from looking at this horrid costume for too long. 

I'm loving making Lisa's hat, though.  At least the straw is cooperating. I made that curl with a lint brush and some steam.  Whoo hoo! I'm using the hat block my boyfriend got me for Christmas, taking a perfectly round hat-head hole and making it something a real person could wear. Maybe I should stick to millinery.